You're Free by Dan Israel

Dan Israel’s You’re Free is a response to personal, political, and cultural crises by a singer-songwriter who happens to be in midlife. As such, it sidesteps midlife-crisis clichés while searching earnestly for change, liberation, and the perfect guitar break. By turns anxious and joyful, sometimes even a bit reckless, it’s a cry of the heart delivered from the cab of a new-used convertible, or a jeremiad shouted from a seventies muscle car rejiggered to run on french-fry grease.

The album, Israel’s fourteenth studio creation, was produced during a transitional period for the Twin Cities native. After twenty-one years on the job, Israel left his editorial position at the nonpartisan Revisor’s Office of the Minnesota State Legislature. This leap of faith has let Israel—for the first time in his adult life—concentrate chiefly on his music, and in addition to writing and recording, he’s been pursuing an active performing schedule, playing his own material as a solo act and bandleader, and putting together sets in tribute to some of his formative influences, including Bob Dylan and Tom Petty. He’s also using this time to find new ways to treat and cope with lifelong struggles with depression and anxiety, as well as severe gastrointestinal ailments that often manifest, in a vicious cycle, with depression and anxiety.

Though Israel can put on a captivating show with just an acoustic guitar and his burry, expressive baritone, he’s more of a rocker than a folkie, and on You’re Free he draws on some of the FM staples of his youth, particularly in the guitar interplay and studio inventions he worked out with producers and longtime collaborators David J. Russ and Rich Mattson. “Someday You’ll Say” on which Israel digs into his upper register, includes beautiful guitar harmonies reminiscent of Thin Lizzy, and the bluesy “Soul Will Be Found” and “Long Gone Dream” would sound excellent in a basement bedroom decorated with tapestries and can collections. The propulsive, addictively catchy title track and statement of intent might become his greatest alternate-reality smash. Other standout tracks include the cockeyed love songs "Back to You" and "If I Didn't Have You," and "Make This Life Mine," which movingly sets a course for long-in-coming self-realization. Few of the songs offer explicitly political messages, but many are colored by frustration, anger, and concern over the political situation, environmental degradation, and the alienation that often accompanies our reliance on social media.

A departure to some degree, You’re Free is also of a piece with Israel’s body of work, a further demonstration of his knack for tuneful, contemplative rock, a gift that’s earned him a loyal and steadily growing following over a quarter century. With his newly flexible schedule, he’ll likely be playing soon in your town. He hopes you’re free.

-Dylan Hicks

Dan Israel is a longtime fixture on the Minneapolis music scene. He was the first guest on 89.3 The Current’s “Local Show” & has been called “the hardest working singer-songwriter in Minnesota.” He won Song of the Year (for “Come to Me”) in the 2005 Minnesota Music Awards & Songwriter of the Year in the 2006 MMA’s. He received a 4-star review from the UK’s “Uncut” mag for his 2007 album "Turning."

danisraelmusic.com